
My introduction to Frankie Goes to Hollywood was much like many others. I was first mesmerized by the pulsating bass stab of their hit single Relax. I had heard the track many times prior but hadn't really studied it until I bought an 80s compilation CD that featured the song. Funny thing is, I bought the compilation for the song Video Killed The Radio Star by the Trevor Horn fronted Buggles. Mr. Horn would go on to produce Relax, Frankie's debut album Welcome To The Pleasuredome, and the executive produce one of my favorite albums of all time, Liverpool.
A few years ago I was helping out a local record shop with a summer warehouse sale. I basically sat in a hot industrial sized storage unit filled with the extra stock and memorabilia of a 30 year old record store. It was not a bad deal at all. I would walk out with boxes and boxes full of records. Prime stuff too. Eric, the employee from the shop, would play Blue Oyster Cult 8-tracks for me and we would talk about the weird breathing noises that open, close, and are found throughout Depeche Mode's Some Great Reward.
Somehow we got on the subject of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and he asked me if I had ever heard their second album, Liverpool. He praised it highly and gave me an extra copy he had bought in the bargain bin. I had played Welcome to The Pleasuredome quite a bit. The singles off the album (Relax, Two Tribes, The Power of Love, Welcome to the Pleasuredome) are great but the rest of the album is primarily made up of cover songs. I don't mean to discredit Pleasuredome in any way. It definitely deserves a potluck post. Heck, Relax could be a post all on its own. The bottom line, I was not sure what to expect of Liverpool.
The album opens with the soft syth pads and angelic female vocals that fill their first album, but soon gives way to an enormous and powerful drum roll backed with a thick bass and guitar onslaught. Warriors of the Wasteland, the opening track, has begun. I was completely confused and wasn't sure what to make of it. It sounded nothing like Relax or anything offered in their earlier works. I spent the rest of the car ride home baffled and ecstatic at the same time. Why had I not heard of this album before? Why wasn't this on one of the top album lists of the 1980s? Where Pleasuredome had been some sort of politically influenced sexual romp through all that was conservative, this felt like it was addressing darker issues and building a unique style and audio aesthetic not as present in their first album.


The lyrics throughout Liverpool create a sense of desolation, poverty, and a battle between the the lower and upper class. Pleasuredome seems to be riddled with thinly disguised sexual innuendo but nothing of the sort exists in this album. Instead one gets the feeling that Liverpool takes a sympathetic look at the blue collar worker, a suffering manufacturing industry, and high unemployment rate in the city that shares the same name with the album.
Warriors of the Wasteland:
It seems to be that the powers that beLunar Bay:
Keep themselves in splendour and security
Armoured cars for megastars
No streets, no bars, yours wealth is ours
They make the masses kiss their asse(t)s
Lower class jackass, pay me tax take out the trash
Working for the world go round
Your job is gold, do as you're told
The pay you less then run for Congress
In the common age of automation, where people mightFor Heaven's Sake:
eventually work ten or twenty hours a week, Man for
the first time will be forced to confront himself with
the true spiritual problems of living
We don't need aggression
We don't need recession
Just give us some money
Our life could be sunny too